• 2015 CoSIDA Special Awards general announcement/release
• Special Awards feature story schedule
By Dick Jeradi, Philadelphia Daily News
Marie Wozniak went to Villanova, thinking she wanted to go into public relations so she majored in communications.
She walked on to the field hockey and softball teams. She met Craig Miller, Dave Coskey, and Ann Guida, all in sports information and discovered a world she did not know existed.
“I just started seeing that there was something where you could do PR with sports,” she said. And she was
intrigued.
“I just figured I would rather do PR for something that I was really interested in, as opposed to working in the corporate world.”
Wozniak liked sports. She liked PR. Sports information is that perfect marriage. So, by the time she graduated from Villanova in 1985, she knew what she wanted to do.
She started applying for internships and, in her words,” really lucked out” because Al Shrier, the legendary Temple sports information director, was “desperate” for an intern in August 1985, right before the school year. He really needed a graduate assistant.
“I think if you ask him today he’ll tell you that he took a chance on me,” Wozniak said. “He hired me and that’s what started it.”
Since that first chance, the Collingswood, New Jersey, native has been a great success wherever she has been and at whatever she tried. Wozniak got her masters in sports administration from Temple in 1988 before going on to work as assistant commissioner and then associate commissioner for PR at the East Coast Conference for four years.
After that, John Wooding hired her as his assistant SID at Seton Hall where she worked with women’s basketball and several other sports including soccer. When Wooding left for Rutgers, Wozniak was promoted and ran the show in her department as the assistant athletic director for communications. She became the men’s basketball contact.
After 10 years at Seton Hall, Wozniak was called home to become the assistant athletic director for communications at Saint Joseph’s, just a few miles from her alma mater and just across the Delaware River from where she grew up. She became and still is the primary media contact for the men’s basketball team (now with the title of associate athletic director for communications) and just happened to arrive on campus in 2003 when St. Joe’s was about to become “the” story of the college basketball season.
For all that Wozniak has done in the business and for how long she has done it, she is being honored with a 25-year award from CoSIDA.
``I did every sport possible that first year at Temple,” Marie said. “They had bowling, they had fencing, gymnastics. I helped with football and women’s basketball. I felt like I was at everything and then I still had to take some classes too. I got a quick taste of it with a 60-hour work week as a grad assistant.”
She was taking all the master’s classes, but knew the practicality of what she “was doing for Al was what going to get me somewhere as opposed to sitting in class at night.”
Wozniak learned a very valuable early lesson.
“I kind of realized it was about relationships and who you get to know and how you work with them,” she said.
She worked often with Wooding in her time at Temple. He was at the Atlantic 10 Conference then and regularly needed information on Temple sports.
So when Wooding got the job at Seton Hall and needed an assistant, he thought of that graduate assistant who had been so helpful when she was at Temple. By then, Wozniak was working at the ECC, but Wooding knew where to find her even though the league office was located in a house in Bordentown, New Jersey, and the league eventually folded.
Relationships matter.
“One of the reasons he told me he hired me is because he knew what I did for him while I was at Temple and how much I helped him out and he knew he could count on me,” Wozniak said. “That’s why I tell people it’s the relationships you make and the impression you leave on people.”
Anybody in the media business who has ever worked with Wozniak knows she can be counted on. If she says something is going to happen, it happens. Ask a question and you will get an answer.
When she got to St. Joe’s in 2003, Wozniak got more questions than she could have ever imagined and had every one of the answers.
Outgoing SID Larry Dougherty, who was headed to Temple, told Wozniak St. Joe’s was going to be pretty good that season and might have a player of the year candidate. But nobody imagined what was about to happen at the small Jesuit University at 54th and City Line in Philadelphia.
“I didn’t know too much about Jameer (Nelson) because I was up in North Jersey,” Wozniak said. “I got there and looked at the files and everything he’d done. I’m sure Phil (coach Phil Martelli) told me we were probably going to be very good, but I don’t even think he realized how good we were going to be.”
They were 27-0 regular season good, No. 1 in the polls one week good, Nelson on the cover of
Sports Illustrated good, and such a great human interest story that media from anywhere and everywhere descended on the campus wanting to know who these people were and how they made this happen.
“At first I benefited from the way Phil handled things because of him being so open and not saying no to any requests,” Wozniak said.
Wozniak did not have to spend any time getting to know the media in Philadelphia. They got to know her immediately. She had the story.
“Everybody had to contact me,” she said. “It wasn’t like I had to go seek people out and get to know them. They needed us. It was everything all at once. I got to know everybody in the city quickly, had everybody’s phone numbers, they got to know me.”
Practices were and are open at St. Joe’s. Anybody can walk in off the street and watch, media member or not. It is just the way of the coach. The new SID had the best story and the right messenger.
Eventually, Nelson won just about every player of the year award, including the Wooden Award. Martelli won nearly every coach of the year award. St. Joe’s finished seconds short of the Final Four.
“Over the years, I had some good teachers with Al and John Wooding,” Wozniak said. “I learned a lot on how they treated the media and how they had great relationships with the media and they would go out of their way for them. I have just always tried to do that and put that into practice.”
Wozniak always went out of her way during the media tsunami that was the 2003-04 basketball season at Saint Joseph’s.
She did it in her jobs before that. And she is doing it still, 12 years and counting at St. Joe’s, more than a quarter century in a profession that is about people and relationships. She understood that quickly when she began. She knows it still.